Here comes the next content patch (3.2)

[Selby]

Hrm. Blizz either buffed the heck out of the champions or I'm getting a string of terrible healers.

It depends.  The priest of the 5-man is definitely the harder of the two and seperates the good players from the average ones.  If you have an undergeared tank, the damage they take is so immense that it can overwhelm a single decently geared healer when trying to keep up with the party-wide damage that can't be stopped.  And without good DPS the fight continues to put out massive party damage which will overcome 2 good healers in time - especially if you can't steal or stop the renew she puts on the boss at 22k health/tick (I love stealing that as a mage, I need zero heals for a good while).  It's the same problem with Saph in Naxx.  If you can't stop his steal life healing and DPS at a decent rate, you won't last to take him down before the frost damage wears your healers down.

[SurfD]

Hrm. Blizz either buffed the heck out of the champions or I'm getting a string of terrible healers.

It depends.  The priest of the 5-man is definitely the harder of the two and seperates the good players from the average ones.  If you have an undergeared tank, the damage they take is so immense that it can overwhelm a single decently geared healer when trying to keep up with the party-wide damage that can't be stopped.  And without good DPS the fight continues to put out massive party damage which will overcome 2 good healers in time - especially if you can't steal or stop the renew she puts on the boss at 22k health/tick (I love stealing that as a mage, I need zero heals for a good while).  It's the same problem with Saph in Naxx.  If you can't stop his steal life healing and DPS at a decent rate, you won't last to take him down before the frost damage wears your healers down.

Part of that fight is also knowing that, as a tank, you CAN still tank the priestess after she summons the nightmare.   Her shield absorbs all damage, but since she is not immune to it, it still counts as threat.  I was in a group where the tank consistantly failed to realise this, and would ONLY tank the Nightmare when it was up, eventually causing the priestess to start random spamming the group, or the healer pull aggro and get 3 shotted.

You can also interrupt her, so having any class with an interupt focus her and have a "use interupt on focus target" macro can cut down on her damage signifigantly.

[Soulflame]

... ToC is hard to heal?  That's news to me.

[Vash]

... ToC is hard to heal?  That's news to me.

It's easily the most healing instensive 5 man in the game, with only things like staying in on Loken giving it a run for it's money.  Combine that with the average skill of any given server's Heroic puggers and.....

Magic 8-ball says:  signs point to fail.   

[Hindenburg]

Part of that fight is also knowing that, as a tank, you CAN still tank the priestess after she summons the nightmare.   Her shield absorbs all damage, but since she is not immune to it, it still counts as threat.  I was in a group where the tank consistantly failed to realise this, and would ONLY tank the Nightmare when it was up, eventually causing the priestess to start random spamming the group, or the healer pull aggro and get 3 shotted.

You can also interrupt her, so having any class with an interupt focus her and have a "use interupt on focus target" macro can cut down on her damage signifigantly.

I've been trying that,  and my rune/frost strikes/howling blasts weren't causing a threat increase in omen, which caused me to consider that they let you dps her down to 20% precisely as an enrage of sorts. Take too long to kill the nightmare and the healer's threat takes over. AMS completely avoids the fear, interestingly enough. I'll second that she can be interrupted.

[Soulflame]

People still run out of Loken's AE?  How quaint!

A tad bit more seriously, HToC hasn't been that rough to heal so far.  Even the PUG I healed went down okay, although we did have to do the last fight a second time.  Everyone stood on top of exploding zombies in phase 2, and the tank went down, along with two of the DPS.   

[K9]

Did heartbreaker on normal tonight, and faction champs both for the first time. With the faction champs we had more success burning down dps with MS while CCing the healers than trying to burn down the healers. We had Druid/Shaman/Paladin/DK/Priest/Hunter, with the Druid and paladin healing. The paladin confused me at first because she had a 2h, so I assumed she was ret, turns out she was holy though. Got a crap healer trinket and some rather nice tank shoulders.

Heartbreaker was really good fun though, definitely a nice way to round out a night of raiding for us.

[Soulflame]

How on earth did you chain CC on the faction champions healers?  We found that to be pretty much impossible, due to PvP CC timers, and reduced effectiveness of CC over time.

[K9]

We couldn't really chain CC very well, but with Wyvern Sting, Polymorph, Repentence, Cyclone and fear we could keep both of the locked up for at least part of the time. Having our tank switch to Arms for MS helped immensely.

You really need MS, CC and purge/dispel spam to get it down; our kill had ~75 dispels in about 3 minutes.

[Fabricated]

ToC10-25 Champion fight seems to be about dispels and gang raping the right mobs first.

[Oban]

The raid I was in killed the shaman first, then the warlock's pet, then the warlock, then the shadow priest, then the resto druid, the paladin and we left the warrior for last.

I spent most of my time using kidney shots, arcane torrent and kicks to keep the healing to a minimum.

Dismantle only works on the paladin, I guess the warrior has a weapon chain.

Had a caster trinket and rogue gloves drop.

Hectic, but fun. 

[Paelos]

The Champions fight is a clusterfuck. I'm again going to play the "Stop putting PvP in my PvE" card. That being said I don't think it completely sucks, but fighting horde with super-tenacity is what I do already in wintergrasp.

[SurfD]

How on earth did you chain CC on the faction champions healers?  We found that to be pretty much impossible, due to PvP CC timers, and reduced effectiveness of CC over time.

The 25 man Faction champs team my guild ran against was Druid, Shaman, Priest for heals, Hunter, Warrior, DK, Shadow Priest, Mage, Ret Paladin and i think Rogue as dps.

We ended up Chain CCing 2 of the healers, and burning them down in order of Priest, Shaman, Druid. (we left the druid for last because he had so many hots that could not be interupted it was best to make sure he was the only healer left standing.

The Trick we found to chain CCing them was A: My guild has LOTS of Druids, and B: proper use of mixed CCs that dont share a DR category.  For instance, if you had a druid and a lock focus on the Druid NPC, a simple cycle of Banish x3 > Cyclone x 3, repeat kept him completely locked down untill one of the other healers were dead.

Also, though i have not confirmed this, supposedly Cyclone has some kind of unique DR in that it only applies a DR to the caste.  So 2 druids can trade off Cyclone x 3 rotations on 1 mob without contributing to each others DR (or something like that)

[K9]

We killed the shaman first, then the DK, then the hunter, then the shadowpriest. Shaman seems like the most annoying, and having a priest spamming mass-dispel to clear out bloodlust/heroism really helps.

[SurfD]

I think the main reason we killed the priest healer first was because 99% of her heals were easy to interrupt, and taking her out first seemed to stop somewhere around 80% of the dispelling the NPCs did.  Then we killed the shaman to remove totems from the fight, and finally the druid, who dies pretty fast when he is the only healer left.  Then we just went around whacking the dps classes 1 by 1.

It was also amusing to be able to call out some abilities you just KNEW were coming too.  Was pretty easy to predict that the mage would iceblock at around 20%, and the ret paladin bubbled at about the same.  Only one that surprised us was that, as far as we could tell, the paladin never once used LoH during the fight (maybe arena rules on cooldowns have been applied to the NPC's?)

We had Druid/Shaman/Paladin/DK/Priest/Hunter, with the Druid and paladin healing. The paladin confused me at first because she had a 2h, so I assumed she was ret, turns out she was holy though.

Was pretty easy to tell that our paladin mob was ret.  We just compared his mana pool to everyone else's.  He had about 1/10th the mana the rest did.

[Fordel]

We killed the shaman first, then the DK, then the hunter, then the shadowpriest. Shaman seems like the most annoying, and having a priest spamming mass-dispel to clear out bloodlust/heroism really helps.

That seems to be the consistent theme I'm seeing from anyone whose done the encounter.

"Hope you like dispelling!"

[Vash]

We killed the shaman first, then the DK, then the hunter, then the shadowpriest. Shaman seems like the most annoying, and having a priest spamming mass-dispel to clear out bloodlust/heroism really helps.

That seems to be the consistent theme I'm seeing from anyone whose done the encounter.

"Hope you like dispelling!"

So it's just like actual PvP then? 

[Fordel]

Instead of DPS Meters, the healers are having Dispel counter fights. Not uncommon to see dispel numbers in the hundreds.

[Merusk]

Fuck the resto druid in the Faction Champs encounter.  Goddamn that shit was ridiculous. 

Of course, even worse is listening to a bunch of 'leet raiders' bitch because they can't adapt to a PvP fight, and won't listen to folks talking about chain CC rotations and other arena strats. 

 "If I wanted to PVP I'd have rolled on a PVP server or done arenas. This is Bullshit!"

[Paelos]

It is bullshit. The PvPers railed horribly when AV came out and it was a huge raid with some players wandering around because guards were so powerful and there was a giant ass mob sitting on Snowfall. Not to mention the summonings.

You shouldn't mix the two as developers. Hell, you especially shouldn't mix the two when you give the other side 20x Tenacity. Even retarded raiders could deal with the fight if they didn't have 400k health on 10 man.

[WindupAtheist]

"Help, this fight isn't running on a completely predictable script and suddenly I don't seem skilled anymore for some totally unrelated reason!"

[Paelos]

"Help, this fight isn't running on a completely predictable script and suddenly I don't seem skilled anymore for some totally unrelated reason!"

Maybe you could help us understand the fight with a detailed breakdown historically in WoW lore why it makes sense. With references.

Nobody wants to pve in pvp or pvp in pve, chuckles.

[Lakov_Sanite]

My guild one-shotted them in 10 and 25man...i don't see the big deal, the new raid is just another loot pinata and it's meant to be.

[Hindenburg]

i don't see the big deal,

Pug it, you'll see it soon enough. Heck, you'll see it about 10 seconds after the OT taunts gormok.

[Lakov_Sanite]

I don't think the game should be super hardcore but there's a point where you cant have everything so casual that you can just pug it.

[Rendakor]

I love the continual hate on PUGs. First two bosses in ToC are PUGable in both 10 and 25. Didn't have much luck with Faction Champions, but we were down to 23 and it was 2am. Haven't attempted them again yet.

[Paelos]

I don't think the game should be super hardcore but there's a point where you cant have everything so casual that you can just pug it.

You are simply wrong. But once again you got lost in the trap of the "ease" of a fight vs. it's stupidity of design.

[Soulflame]

I've only seen the Faction Champions fight on 10 man so far, should see the 25 man version tomorrow.

I'm not looking forward to it.  Stupid PvP fight.

Of course, so far my judgement is the 10 man is harder than 25, so it may actually go rather smoothly.

[Triforcer]

I'm missing something.  How is a boss fight a PvP fight?  Are NPCs who are scripted too unpredictably now "griefers"?  Have the Disciples of PvE sunk that low?

[Trippy]

I'm missing something.  How is a boss fight a PvP fight?  Are NPCs who are scripted too unpredictably now "griefers"?  Have the Disciples of PvE sunk that low?

It's more akin to a PvP fight cause those NPCs follow rules more akin to actual PvP battles. E.g. you can't tank any of them cause they don't follow the normal aggro/taunting rules.

[Triforcer]

I call bullshit on the whiners then.  Its pretty intellectually dishonest to say "don't bring PvP into PvE!!!1!!1" when you really mean "I'm not skilled enough to do anything but press buttons in the wowwiki predetermined order, please dumb it down so I can continue to enjoy delicious lead wallcandy." 

[Merusk]

I call bullshit on the whiners then.  Its pretty intellectually dishonest to say "don't bring PvP into PvE!!!1!!1" when you really mean "I'm not skilled enough to do anything but press buttons in the wowwiki predetermined order, please dumb it down so I can continue to enjoy delicious lead wallcandy." 

Yep.

Tried explaining arena CC chains & rotations. They decided to go with spamming sheep while completely ignoring the Arms warrior and Rogue who were fucking the casters to hell and back.  When it's a 10 v 25 fight, "JUST FOCUS ON THE DRUID" isn't a good solution.  Of course, being unable to manaburn their casters with any noticeable effect is, in fact, bullshit.

10 man I had fewer problems, but we didn't have that fucking resto druid.  God how I hate them.

[Trippy]

I call bullshit on the whiners then.  Its pretty intellectually dishonest to say "don't bring PvP into PvE!!!1!!1" when you really mean "I'm not skilled enough to do anything but press buttons in the wowwiki predetermined order, please dumb it down so I can continue to enjoy delicious lead wallcandy." 

Not sure how that's being intellectually dishonest. Those NPCs are designed to require PvP-style tactics to defeat. Some people don't like that PvP-style gameplay. Ergo they don't want PvP in their PvE game.

[Triforcer]

I call bullshit on the whiners then.  Its pretty intellectually dishonest to say "don't bring PvP into PvE!!!1!!1" when you really mean "I'm not skilled enough to do anything but press buttons in the wowwiki predetermined order, please dumb it down so I can continue to enjoy delicious lead wallcandy." 

Not sure how that's being intellectually dishonest. Those NPCs are designed to require PvP-style tactics to defeat. Some people don't like that PvP-style gameplay. Ergo they don't want PvP in their PvE game.

Umm, no.  PvP is PvP.  PvE is PvE.  Where is the line between "PvP" PvE mechanics and PvE PvE mechanics?  I didn't like how that one vanilla boss would silence the healer sometime.  OMG, THEY USE SILENCE IN PVP!!!1!

[Fabricated]

The PVP fight fucking sucks since it's nothing like PVP. The faction heroes machinegun spells and abilities with nary a cooldown in sight, they have unlimited mana you cannot fucking burn through, and they heal for way WAY more than even your most epic'd out raid member. It's not too hard but it's a dumb fight.